Matt Howitt

Profound Commerce. I founded Profound Commerce and ran it as CEO, from nothing to roughly $70 million in annual revenue and about 75 people. We raised around $50 million along the way — three friends-and-family rounds, two priced venture rounds, and two SAFEs — which is where most of what I know about cap tables comes from, largely by getting parts of it wrong the first time. We sold the company in early 2024.

Every piece of that was a first for me at some point: the first real hire, the first term sheet I didn't fully understand, the first time the books were wrong in a way that mattered, the first acquisition conversation, the first litigation. Most of what I'm useful for now comes from having gotten some of those wrong.

Before that. Twenty-five years across software engineering, product, go-to-market, operations, finance, legal, M&A, and hiring at scale — starting at Trilogy in the 1990s. Most advisors are deep in one lane. I've been in most of them, which is less about expertise in any single one and more about knowing what a good answer looks like and who to call for the rest.

Today. I'm still building. Alongside the advisory practice I own and operate a family of real estate development and private lending businesses, and I hold equity in a couple of early-stage companies. My own capital, my own guarantees — which is the part that keeps this useful. I'm not advising from memory; I'm doing a version of the same work on my own account, this week. None of it is something this advisory practice sells, and the two are kept deliberately separate.

I live in Austin, Texas.